Enjoy a quote a day... or indulge all at once

Groundhog Day! A good time to reflect on the nature of gardening
and also seek advice for the upcoming season. So we've expanded the
Quotations library
with these gems.

48 days until spring begins, 48 new quotes (with over 90
illustrations) to make you think, grin or just say "Ahhh." Click
any saying here to see it illustrated in our Quotes collection.

We don't mean you should wish the wintertime away. There's a lot
to be done before spring -- even if we discount the spring
housecleaning that we want done and behind us so we can go out and
stay out.

Come prune with us in a thaw, meet us for a winter conference,
or reserve a date for hands-on learning at a Garden by Janet
& Steven. Check our website calendar and please
notice the three Secrets
workshops beginning May 2.

Quotes about the gardener's nature:

...the laying out of the spring bulb garden (was) a crucial
operation, carefully charted and full of witchcraft. ...As the
years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet
touching in her bedraggled appearance... her studied absorption in
the implausible notion that there
would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own
days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there
with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying
October, calmly planning the resurrection.

Words on watering:

...set the basketball on the kitchen table. Open a cupboard, get
out a bottle of sesame seeds, and place a single seed beside the
basketball. If you were to reduce the Earth to the size of a
basketball, all the fresh surface water on the planet -- all those
rivers and lakes and ponds and streams -- would fit inside that one
tiny sesame seed. Add a second sesame seed; now you have all the
usable underground water as well. Is fresh water a scarce resource?

- William Ashworth, The Economy
of Nature, 1995 -

Fertilizer fact:

From a market garden, one would send the cart to town with
produce and it would come back loaded with manure and night soil.
This was an important exchange for both a garden in
need of fertilizer and a town where a large number of horses and
other livestock were housed.

Talk about tools:

A digging fork is a stout, short-handled tool with four flat
tines about a foot long.... for weeding I use it delicately to nudge the soil loose from roots without
breaking them...

- Sara Stein, My Weeds: A
Gardener's Botany, 1988 -

Some tools are ancient, some surprisingly modern. In museums we see Roman
spades of heavy iron and wooden, iron-edged medieval spades along
with many forks and hoes. Yet the one-wheeled barrow was not around
until the 1300's and the trowel not for another 300 years.

- Dr. D.G. Hessayon, The Bedside
Book of the Garden, 1988 -

A word on pruning:

He carries a knife, curved like a crane's bill and sharpened to
a deadly edge, and this he whips out to prune a dwarf fruit tree in
minutes. "Mind you, don't leave a stump; cut your branch right to
the bone."

- Eleanor Perényi, Green
Thoughts, 1981 -

Quotes from the front, fending off bugs and animals:

It's best to smoosh pine sawflies with rubber
gloves.
Their guts eventually soak through cloth. Eww.

- Sonja Nikkila, Lessons from
Childhood Apprenticeship -

'What do you do with slugs, Georgie?'
'Pretend you don't see them.'
- E.F. Benson, Lucia in London, 1927 -

'What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?'
the gnat inquired.
'I don't rejoice in insects at all,'
Alice explained.

- Lewis Carroll, Through the
Looking-glass -

The families of rabbits or woodchucks will eat the salad greens
just before they are ready to be picked; I plot ways to kill these animals but
can never bring myself to do it...

- Jamaica Kincaid -

Passed along about storing plants:

The Emigrant's Friend recommended wrapping seeds in tinfoil (for the long
voyage) and then putting them in a barrel which had been lined with
moist sugar, with layers of sugar in between each lot of seeds.
Others swore they got the best results when they placed their seeds
in melted beeswax. Pulpy fruits, such as currants, gooseberries,
mulberries and strawberries, were squashed between layers of cotton
or blotting paper, carefully dried and then inserted in letters or
parcels...

- from A History of Gardening in
New Zealand by Bee Dawson -

Said about working smart:

We've learned over 25 years of interviewing other professional
gardeners, especially in public gardens, that no
one is ever 'all caught up.' Gardeners tell us, 'If
only I had more time!' That's the case no matter how large a staff
they have, how well tended their garden to begin with, or how
full-time they are. - Janet -

Quotable lawn:

Sure, as garden makers we rip up lots of sod. But as designers
we know nothing else sets off a bed so beautifully as a surrounding of
lush lawn. - Janet -

Wise words on design:

...the possession of a quantity of plants, however good the
plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not
make a garden; it only makes a collection. Having got the plants,
the great thing is to use them with careful selection and definite intention.

Said while choosing plants:

I have pinched cuttings to which I had no
right myself, and I can remember most such occasions with more glee
than shame.

- Christopher Lloyd, In My Garden,
1994 -

Quotes about vegetable gardens:

A garden... is a finite place the gardener... has created,
working on it with or against nature, a plot whose intention it is to provide
pleasure; possibly in the form of beauty, possibly in the form of
cabbages -- and possibly, beautiful cabbages.

- Abby Adams, The Gardener's
Gripe Book, 1995 -

The first gathering of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby --
how could anything so beautiful be mine?

- Alice B. Toklas -

The farmers loved her bees, thanks to all the
pollinating they did, how they made the watermelons redder and the
cucumbers bigger.

Talking of trees:

On either side of the front walk
there towered two old horse-chestnut trees. I loved their
sticky,
unfurling leaves, and when they bore their
candles
it was magic, breath-catching, eye-delighting.
Cut
down, cut down. What kind of man cuts down trees
that took all those years to grow? I do
not
understand.
- from the poem Horse-Chestnut Trees and Roses by James
Schuyler -

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which
stands in the way.

- William Blake -

...Cinderella at the ball, the common mulberry, so
drab and unappreciated the remainder of the year, suddenly
(briefly) glows brilliant yellow, a beacon of splendor.

- Carol Bishop Hipps, In a
Southern Garden, 1994 -

About the wildflowers and native plants:

There are some optimists who search eagerly for the skunk
cabbage which in February sometimes pushes itself up through
the ice, and who call it a sign of spring. I wish that I could feel
that way about it, but I do not. The truth of the matter, to me, is
simply that skunk cabbage blooms in the winter time.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay
our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect's view of its
plain.

- Henry David Thoreau -

Quote these amazing facts:

We've heard that a first class head gardener requires longer training than a
surgeon or lawyer. Not surprising, since the surgeon or lawyer are
working with just one species. The gardener tends hundreds of
different plant species and must know the ins and outs of many
animal species, too.

Talk about living in the garden:

A single painted gnome sends out a message we
think we can read and either tolerate or ridicule. If your
immediate reaction is a patronizing dismissal of both gnome and
owner, you had better examine very carefully your own trash-filled
life.

Said to and by children in the garden:

(Caterpillars) have most wonderful appetites and hardly stop
feeding all day long... they grow very quickly; and in a few days
time they find their jackets are much too tight for them. Then a most curious thing happens. Their skins
split right down the back, and they wriggle and twist about... till
at last they manage to creep out of them altogether and appear in
new ones, which had been gradually forming underneath the
old!
Wouldn't it be nice if we could get new suits of clothes, or new
frocks, as easily as this?

- Theodore Wood, Butterflies and
Moths Shown to Children -

Ensemble issues posted, too:

In addition, twenty-one issues have been added to the
library or illustrated during the last three months. Issue #206
provided links to those issues' 100+ articles and hundreds of
photos. All are now accessible on-site with just a click or a
keyword Search:

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